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Keith Fuller: Pruning palms too severely can harm them

If you could save money on your landscape while protecting the health of some of your plants, would you do it? A common practice in many local landscapes is to annually prune palm trees. This can actually increase the chances of insect infestation and disease.

The practice of ‘hurricane cutting’ palm trees has become quite popular. This entails the annual removal of all but about seven fronds from certain varieties of palms. While some people like the look of the trimmed palms, it actually can pose unintended consequences for the tree.

The cabbage/sable palm is one that is commonly pruned. In nature, a healthy cabbage palm holds about 20 green fronds in its crown. Reducing this number to only seven, annually, limits the plants ability to make food and be healthy.

Cutting green fronds from a palm tree causes the tree to emit a stress pheromone. Palmetto weevils lay their eggs in the crown of stressed palms, attracted by the scent of the pheromone. The weevil then gives off a scent to attract others and a breeding infestation occurs. Usually a palm cannot be saved once a weevil infestation occurs.

For this reason, only brown dead fronds should be removed from a palm tree. Another reason is they cannot be affected by contaminated pruning equipment like green fronds can. Disease can enter a tree through living tissue, but not dead tissue.